NBER WORKING PAPER SERIES

PAINTING BY PROXY:THE CONCEPTUAL ARTIST AS MANUFACTURER

David W. Galenson

Working Paper 12714http://www.nber.org/papers/w12714

NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH1050 Massachusetts Avenue

Cambridge, MA 02138December 2006

The views expressed herein are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of theNational Bureau of Economic Research.

© 2006 by David W. Galenson. All rights reserved. Short sections of text, not to exceed two paragraphs,may be quoted without explicit permission provided that full credit, including © notice, is given tothe source.

Painting by Proxy: The Conceptual Artist as ManufacturerDavid W. GalensonNBER Working Paper No. 12714December 2006JEL No. J0

ABSTRACT

In 1958, the French philosopher Etienne Gilson observed that "painters are related to manual laborersby a deep-rooted affinity that nothing can eliminate," because painting was the one art in which theperson who conceives the work is also necessarily the person who executes it. Conceptual innovatorspromptly proved Gilson wrong, however, by eliminating the touch of the artist from their paintings:in 1960 the French artist Yves Klein began using "living brushes" - nude models covered with paint- to execute his paintings, and in 1963 Andy Warhol began having his assistant Gerard Malanga silkscreenhis canvases. Today many leading artists do not touch their own paintings, and some never see them.This paper traces the innovations that allowed a complete separation between the conception and executionof paintings. The foundation of this separation was laid long before the 20th century, by conceptualOld Masters including Raphael and Rubens, who employed teams of assistants to produce their paintings,but artists began exploring its logical limits during the conceptual revolution of the 1960s and beyond.Thus by the end of the twentieth century Jeff Koons explained that he did not participate in the workof painting his canvases because he believed it would interfere with his growth as an artist, and DamienHirst defended his practice of having his paintings made by assistants on the grounds that their paintingswere better than his. Eliminating the touch of the artist from painting is yet another way in which conceptualinnovators transformed art in the twentieth century.

David W. GalensonDepartment of EconomicsUniversity of Chicago1126 East 59th StreetChicago, IL 60637and NBERgalenson@uchicago.edu

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Introduction

In 1955, in the A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts at the National Gallery of

Art, Washington, the French philosopher Etienne Gilson, a member of the Académie

Française, presented his analysis of the art of painting. These lectures were published in

both English and French in 1958.1 Early in this discussion, Gilson reflected on the

production of paintings:

The nature of painting is such that the artist who conceives thework is also the one who executes it. This proposition is notnecessarily true of the sculptor, but it is assuredly true of thepainter. Except for tasks of secondary importance that can easilybe left to his assistants, it is the painter himself who confers thematerial and physical existence upon the work he conceives.2

The touch of the painter created the work of art: “It is the hand of the painter that

embodies in actually existing physical objects the conceptions of his mind.” Unlike

poets, playwrights, novelists, and composers, who are white-collar workers, painters

necessarily work with their hands: “when all is said and done, painters (and sculptors) are

related to manual laborers by a deep-rooted affinity that nothing can eliminate.” Gilson

underscored this point: “As often as not, a painter has to don working clothes in the same

way as a mechanic or any other artisan. He does not resent dirtying his hands with

paint.”3 Nor could the artist choose whether or not to execute his own paintings: “a

painter is the sole and total cause of his work.”4

In considering the issue of authenticity, Gilson described what he called an

extreme case in which an artist, presented with an imitation of his work done by another

artist, might add his own touches to the painting and then sign it:

Is such a painting authentic? No, since most of it has not beendone by the painter himself. Yes, since, after being done in his

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own manner, this work of art has been completed by the painterhimself and finally acknowledged by him as his own work.5

The case for authenticity thus involves the physical touch of the artist. Gilson was of

course aware that a number of Old Masters had routinely made paintings in collaboration

with others, but he noted that in every case these collaborations involved “a master and

assistants working together under his direction and responsibility.” 6 In two examples he

discussed, both Rubens and Delacroix used assistants to paint parts of the works that the

masters completed.7

Gilson stressed that his account of art rested in large part on the views of artists:

“painters will perhaps notice how careful I have been to listen to what they themselves

had to say concerning the nature of their own work.” 8 He gave no indication that his

analysis of the nature of painting would meet with any disagreement from artists. Yet

even when he wrote, his statement of the nature of painting had been contradicted by the

practice of at least one significant painter of the early twentieth century. Interestingly, it

had also been rejected in theory by the private statements of the greatest painter of the

twentieth century. And more importantly, within just a few years after Gilson wrote,

major artists would create important paintings that controverted Gilson’s definitions, and

their practices would change the mainstream of advanced art. Today some of the greatest

artists do not touch their paintings, and some do not even supervise those who do touch

these works. Recent innovations in art have radically changed the nature of painting, so

that many painters have joined their literary and musical peers as white-collar workers.

And recent research on artistic creativity has given us an understanding of the common

elements that underlie this new practice.

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Old Masters

Before examining the experience of the twentieth century, it is useful to return

briefly to an earlier time. Recent investigations of the practices of two great seventeenth-

century painters provide some valuable clues to the source of the novel practices of more

recent times.

Peter Paul Rubens and Rembrandt van Rijn were both recognized by

contemporaries as among the most talented painters who worked in the seventeenth-

century Netherlands. Both Rubens in Antwerp and Rembrandt in Amsterdam operated

sizable workshops where they were surrounded by numerous pupils and assistants.9 Yet

the two painters ran their workshops very differently.

Rubens collaborated with his assistants in the execution of large numbers of

paintings. Zirka Filipczak described his practice:

Rubens provided the crucial invention for each piece butdelegated much of the actual execution to others. To thisend, he provided his pupils, assistants, and collaboratorswith models for the general composition of a picture in theform of preparatory drawings and, especially, disegnicoloriti or oil sketches. He often also furnished models forindividual parts of the work, such as head studies, many ofwhich he kept on file in his studio. With works largelyexecuted by his assistants, Rubens generally retouched thefinal product in order to restore the spark of life where ithad been dulled by uninspired execution.10

There was considerable variation in the amount of work the master did personally, and

the cost of his paintings varied accordingly. So for example in 1618 Rubens wrote to a

patron that paintings not entirely by his hand “are rated at a much lower price.”11

Recent scholarship has revealed that Rembrandt’s practice was very different.

Svetlana Alpers concluded that “So far as we know he almost never collaborated on

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paintings with assistants.”12 Unlike the joint products made by Rubens and his assistants,

in Rembrandt’s studio the works were all made separately, so that Rembrandt was “a

master surrounded by student-assistants each eventually producing paintings on their

own for sale.”13 Josua Bruyn stressed this difference: “being an assistant in Rembrandt’s

studio meant taking one’s own share in the studio’s output rather than – as was the case

with, for instance, Rubens – assisting the master in the execution of large paintings.”14

Alpers explained that Rubens’ method of making paintings allowed a division of

labor:

He developed a painting factory: assistants specialized incertain skills - landscapes, animals, and so on - and themaster devised a mode of invention employing a clevercombination of oil sketches and drawings. These permittedhis inventions to be executed by others, sometimes withfinal touches to hands or faces by the master himself.15

Rembrandt worked very differently, making paintings without preparatory sketches and

drawings. Ernst van de Wetering concluded that “Rembrandt…rarely prepared his

paintings with the aid of drawings.”16 Alpers agreed that “Rembrandt’s habit was not to

work out his inventions in advance through drawings, but rather to invent paintings in the

course of their execution.”17 Because Rembrandt’s method of working did not separate

invention and execution, his workshop could not operate like that of Rubens, for without

drawings or other plans to guide them, his assistants could not actually work on his

paintings: “Rather than executing his inventions… Rembrandt’s students had to make

paintings like his.”18

Art historians have long recognized that some Old Masters worked

collaboratively, like Rubens, and that others, like Rembrandt, did not. Thus, for example,

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Alpers observed that “While Raphael and Rubens could work with a team, Leonardo and

most notably Michelangelo, could not.”19 Alpers suggested that these differences could

have been due to personality - Rembrandt “was not a man who got on easily with others”

- but it is more likely that a general explanation lies in what Alpers calls the artist’s

“pictorial personality.”20 Raphael, like Rubens, was a conceptual artist who made

meticulous plans for his paintings that could then be carried out by others, much as some

architects make detailed blueprints that others can follow in building their projects. In

contrast, Leonardo and Michelangelo, like Rembrandt, were experimental artists who

were not comfortable planning their works, and who had to execute their own paintings

because they did not believe in separating invention and execution.21 Important

conceptual painters who were capable of planning their works in advance could hire

assistants to execute paintings, based on their blueprints - preparatory drawings and oil

sketches - whereas experimental painters generally would be incapable of collaborating

with others, because of their inability to anticipate the final appearance of their paintings.

Interestingly, we know that the different methods by which painters produced

their works were familiar to seventeenth-century Dutch painters. In his book,

Introduction to the Higher Education of the Art of Painting, published in 1678, the

painter Samuel van Hoogstraten, a former student of Rembrandt, described a contest that

was supposed to have occurred in Holland around 1630, in which three painters were

given the task of painting a landscape within a specified time limit before an audience of

art connoisseurs.22 The first painter immediately began to paint finished forms, by

routine. The second painter began by covering his canvas with a variety of colors, “here

light there dark more or less like a variegated agate or marbled paper,” then created

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houses, ships, and other forms that were suggested by these random markings: “In short,

his eye, as though looking for forms that lay hidden in a chaos of paint, steered his hand

in true wise so that one saw a complete painting before one realized what he intended.”

The third painter initially appeared to be doing nothing - “it seemed at first even that he

was deliberately wasting time, or knew not how he should begin” - but in fact he was

creating a mental image of the finished work: “he was first forming in his imagination the

whole conception of his work; he was first making the painting in his mind before he put

his brush into the paint.” In the end, the third painter was judged the winner, for he had

“in his well-chosen naturalness and in the art something extraordinary,” which was

considered superior to the first painter’s works “that flow easily from the hand,” or the

second painter’s works made “by searching and finding in random images.”23

The first artist in the account, who produced conventional and repetitive works,

was not a potential innovator. The second artist was an experimental painter, who found

his subject as he worked, whereas the third artist was a conceptual painter, who

preconceived images before executing them. While it is suggestive that the work of the

conceptual painter was deemed the best, since the academic tradition accorded its

greatest honors to art that originated in ideas, Hoogstraten’s anecdote demonstrates that

seventeenth-century artists were aware of both the experimental and the conceptual

approaches to painting.

Understanding the differences in the practices of conceptual and experimental Old

Masters provides a useful background for our consideration of the twentieth century,

when some conceptual artists would delegate even more of the work involved in

executing their paintings. And for this purpose the practice of Rubens yields one more

9

interesting insight. The specific case is not strictly relevant to this inquiry, because it

involves the production of prints rather than paintings, but it is suggestive.

When Rubens completed a painting he sometimes had a printmaker produce

copies of the work; this was common among a number of masters of the time, for the

circulation of numerous and relatively inexpensive prints allowed their work to become

known much more widely throughout Europe. Following the normal practice, Rubens

would generally provide a drawing of his painting that the printmaker would translate

into his medium. Late in his life, however, Rubens departed from this practice:

In a few exceptional cases in the late 1630s, Rubens providedinventions without preparing any model. Crippled by gout, hesometimes found it difficult to work on the small scale that wasnecessary in preparatory drawings for frontispieces. This physicallimitation led him to experiment with a novel procedure. Hedictated his ideas to Erasmus Quellinus who then recorded them ina drawing. The frontispieces engraved after this type of drawingbore the following credits: “Erasmus Quellinius delineavit, Pet.Paul. Rubenius invenit, Corn. Galleus junior sculpsit.” Eventhough he had not lifted a pencil in the manual execution of awork, Rubens was thus recognized as the inventor of a visualimage – a revolutionary idea in the 17th century.24

Rubens’ practice in these cases can logically be seen as a preview of the behavior of

many conceptual painters of the second half of the twentieth century.

Young Geniuses

In the Dada Almanac, published in Berlin in 1920, an article jointly authored by

the artist Jean Arp, the poet Tristan Tzara, and a writer named Walter Serner proposed

that paintings could be executed by proxy: “the good painter was recognized, for

instance, by the fact that he ordered his works from a carpenter, giving his specifications

on the phone.”25 This idea evidently resonated with Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, a young

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Hungarian painter who was then working in Berlin. Under the influence of

Constructivism and Suprematism, Moholy-Nagy was searching for new ways of making

art that would replace easel painting, in which engineer-artists would provide designs for

works of art that could be mass produced. In 1922, Moholy-Nagy designed three colored

compositions on graph paper and had them manufactured from industrial enamel. A

biographer of the artist noted that “The result was not an industrial product, not even a

model, but a perfectly composed and artistically constructed work of art: a Suprematist

composition appearing not on canvas but on a slightly curved metal plate.”26 Moholy-

Nagy ordered the three works in person, but when they were completed, he declared “I

might even have done it over the telephone!”, and in later years they were given the name

“telephone pictures.”27

Moholy-Nagy was a protean conceptual artist. He became an influential teacher

at the Bauhaus, and he made contributions in areas as diverse as photography, industrial

design, documentary films, and the design of stage sets for opera and theatre. He did not

pursue the concept of the telephone pictures, and they did not influence the course of

advanced art. Yet his execution of the Dada idea has led some art scholars to consider

him “a visionary in regard to Minimal Art and the modern concept of anonymous

authorship.”28

The idea of painting by proxy did not disappear in later years. An interesting

instance appears in Francoise Gilot’s account of her life with Picasso. Gilot, who was

herself a painter, wrote of an incident in 1948 when Picasso was working on a large

painting, La Cuisine. After he had completed the basic forms, he told Gilot: “I see two

possible directions for this canvas. I want another one just like it, to start from. You make

11

a second version up to this point and I’ll work on it from there. I want it tomorrow.”

Because of the little time available, Gilot called Picasso’s nephew, Javier Vilato, who was

also a painter, and asked him to help her. Working together, the two completed the task,

and Picasso subsequently made two different versions of the painting. Gilot recalled that

she did similar jobs for Picasso on several occasions to save him time when he wanted to

develop a composition in two different ways: “That gave him a chance to get to the main

point quickly and work over it longer.” She noted that “For Pablo my collaboration was a

practical demonstration of the truth of one of his favorite aphorisms: ‘If I telegraph one of

my canvases to New York,’ he said, ‘any house-painter should be able to do it properly.

A painting is a sign - just like the sign that indicates a one-way street.’”29

The 1960s witnessed a series of departures from Gilson’s characterization of the

nature of painting, the first of which occurred at the very beginning of the decade. Early

in 1960, in Paris Yves Klein began to create paintings with what he called “living

brushes.” Nude models would cover themselves with Klein’s patented International Klein

Blue paint, then press themselves against large sheets of paper tacked to the wall or laid

on the floor. In one production in March 1960, one hundred invited guests filled a Paris

art gallery and listened to a small orchestra as they watched three nude models create the

paintings that the critic Pierre Restany had named “anthropometries.” Klein, dressed

formally in a tuxedo and white tie, stood nearby giving the models instructions and

directions as they worked. This performance was documented by hired photographers, as

were a number of subsequent sessions. On some later occasions, Klein added white

gloves to his formal attire, to underscore his physical separation from the execution of the

paintings. As he explained,

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In this way I stayed clean. I no longer dirtied myself with color,not even the tips of my fingers. The work finished itself there infront of me, under my direction, in absolute collaboration with themodel. And I could salute its birth into the tangible world in adignified manner, dressed in a tuxedo.30

The process satisfied Klein’s conception of the artistic process, because he believed that

the artist should conceive works of art but not personally produce physical objects. Using

living brushes allowed him to retain control of the production of the paintings without any

direct physical contact.

Unlike Moholy-Nagy’s telephone paintings, Klein’s anthropometries became

influential for advanced art. Klein was the most important French painter of his

generation, and the anthropometries became his most important works.31 Many younger

artists were impressed both by Klein’s detachment from the execution of his paintings and

by the flair of the performances at which he produced them.

Klein eliminated the artist’s touch from the creation of paintings, but retained

personal control over the assistants who executed them. In 1962, Robert Rauschenberg

dispensed with the latter as well. In 1951, as a student at Black Mountain College,

Rauschenberg had made the White Paintings, a series of canvases to which he applied

white paint evenly with a roller. Although these were ostensibly empty canvases,

shadows and reflections served to create images, demonstrating to Rauschenberg’s

satisfaction that there was in fact no such thing as an empty canvas. The impact of the

White Paintings was considerable, for when the composer John Cage saw them he

responded by writing his famous 4’33”, which demonstrated that there was in fact no such

thing as silence.32

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The original White Paintings disappeared; Rauschenberg often painted over his

works, and these seven unmarked canvases must have been particularly inviting targets.

In 1962, Pontus Hulten, the director of Stockholm’s Moderna Museet, contacted

Rauschenberg to request the White Paintings for an exhibition. Rauschenberg told Hulten

the paintings had been lost, but sent him the measurements of the panels together with

samples of the white pigment and canvas, and Hulten had them re-created.33 This may

have marked the first time that an important artist had authorized the execution of his

paintings without supervising the execution, or even seeing the result. It is presumed that

Hulten destroyed the paintings after exhibiting them, because when Rauschenberg’s

dealer, Leo Castelli, wanted to exhibit the works in 1968, Rauschenberg had his current

assistant, the painter Brice Marden, prepare a new set.34

Andy Warhol may have done more than any other artist of his generation to

subvert traditional practices and attitudes associated with painting. Both his paintings and

his statements about them systematically undermined the generalizations Gilson had made

in 1958. Early in 1962 Warhol began to use stencils, and with them he made the 32

paintings of Campbell’s soup cans that were exhibited at his first solo show, at Los

Angeles’ Ferus Gallery in June.35 In July Warhol discovered that he could work much

more quickly by silkscreening his paintings. During the next three months he made 100

pictures, including the portraits of Marilyn Monroe and the images of Coca-Cola bottles

that became the basis for his first solo show in New York, at the Stable Gallery in

November.36

Warhol’s paintings exploded on the art world, and almost overnight he came to be

seen as the leader of the controversial new Pop movement. The demand for his work

14

soared, and in 1963 he hired Gerard Malanga as his first assistant. Later in the year,

Warhol moved his studio into a warehouse and factory building that became the first of

four of his studios to be called the Factory. During this time Warhol began making

statements embracing the use of mechanical processes and stressing his personal

detachment from the execution of his art. So for example in a 1963 interview published in

a leading art magazine, he declared “I think somebody should be able to do all my

paintings for me,” and explained his use of screening by stating “The reason I’m painting

this way is that I want to be a machine.”37 In another interview the same year, when he

was asked what his profession was, Warhol responded “Factory owner.”38 In his practice,

the mechanical process of silkscreening, the use of magazine photographs as the images of

his paintings, and the serial repetition of these images not only from one work to another,

but often within a single work, all served to emphasize the absence of the human element

in general in the execution of the works and the absence of Warhol’s touch in particular.

There is uncertainty about the actual division of labor between Warhol and his

assistants. In a 1965 interview he declared that “Gerard does all my paintings,” and in

1966, when asked about his role in making the paintings, he replied “I just selected the

subjects.” Years later, however, he insisted that “I really do all the paintings,” disowning

an earlier statement to the contrary by explaining “We were just being funny.”39

Concerning the early years, Malanga recalled that “When the screens were very large, we

worked together; otherwise I was left to my devices.”40 Malanga further explained that

the need for the artist’s quality control was ruled out by Warhol’s philosophy:

Each painting took about four minutes, and we worked asmechanically as we could, trying to get each image right, but we

15

never got it right… Andy embraced his mistakes. We neverrejected anything. Andy would say, “It’s part of the art.”41

The mechanical production of Warhol’s paintings led to concerns about forgery.

Warhol publicly dismissed these in a 1981 interview, confidently stating that “If there are

any fakes around I can tell.”42 According to Malanga, however, the problem was more

serious: “Unlike Rauschenberg, Andy never destroyed his screens after they were used,

and for this reason he has always been worried about the possibility of a forgery. If

somebody faked his art, he could never hope to identify it.”43

Sol LeWitt was a leading member of the Conceptual art movement of the late

1960s. In a manifesto published in 1967, LeWitt stated a basic tenet:

In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspectof the work. When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, itmeans that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehandand the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes amachine that makes the art.

LeWitt spelled out one immediate consequence: “This kind of art… is usually free from

the dependence on the skill of the artist as craftsman.”44 Two years later, LeWitt again

stressed the primacy of planning: “Once the idea of the piece is established in the artist’s

mind and the final form is decided, the process is carried out blindly”.45

In 1968, LeWitt made the first example of what would become his trademark

form of art, works drawn or painted directly onto walls. In a 1971 statement defining the

genre, he described the possibility of a complete separation between the originator of the

work and the person who executed it:

The artist conceives and plans the wall drawing. It is realized bydraftsmen (the artist can act as his own draftsman); the plan(written, spoken, or drawn) is interpreted by the draftsman.

16

LeWitt specified that the artist and draftsman would “become collaborators in making the

art.” He went on to treat the issue of the validity of the finished work:

The wall drawing is the artist’s art, as long as the plan is notviolated. If it is, then the draftsman becomes the artist and thedrawing would be his work of art, but art that is a parody of theoriginal concept.

The draftsman may make errors in following the plan. Allwall drawings contain errors, they are part of the work.46

In the three and a half decades since this statement was written, LeWitt has

produced hundreds of wall drawings. Yet he has never specified who would determine

whether the plan for a particular wall drawing was violated, or according to what criteria.

In practice, this determination frequently cannot be done by the artist, for LeWitt often

does not see the final works. It is possible for purchasers of the drawings to have them

executed by LeWitt’s designated assistants, but this is not required by any of the artist’s

statements, and LeWitt has encouraged the owners of simple wall drawings to execute

them themselves.47

When the touch of the artist is no longer necessary for the creation of a painting,

the question arises of what determines authenticity. Warhol never fully confronted this

question. One result is that there are frequent disputes over whether specific works can

properly be sold as his, and the decisions of official experts on the authenticity of

particular works by Warhol often appear arbitrary. LeWitt has dealt with this problem,

however. Purchasers of wall drawings receive certificates of authenticity, signed by the

artist; these are often accompanied by diagrams of the works.48 The economic value of

the wall drawings is considerably increased by the fact that they can be moved from

place to place, simply by painting them in a new location. Each drawing is supposed to

17

exist in only one location at a time, so when a new version is executed the old one is

supposed to be painted over.

Since the 1960s, it has become commonplace for successful painters to employ

assistants who perform most or of all the labor involved in executing their finished

works. There are too many cases of this to catalogue in full. Several important artists

can serve as examples.

In 1988 Peter Schjeldahl remarked that Jeff Koons “may be the definitive artist of

this moment,” and in 2004 Arthur Danto confirmed that “It is widely acknowledged that

Jeff Koons is among the most important artists of the last decades of the twentieth

century.”49 The value of Koons’ art is considerable; his works have sold at auction for

more than $1 million on more than 20 occasions. In an interview in 2000 with the

English critic David Sylvester, Koons gave a detailed account of the preparation of seven

large paintings, each more than 135 square feet in size, for an exhibition at the

Guggenheim Museum in Berlin. Koons began by taking images from magazines and

books, and arranging them into composites with a computer: “After I have an image on a

computer file that I like, we make a digital slide. And then the slide is projected and we

draw out the image on the canvas.” The painting was then done by hired assistants.

Because the work was done under time pressure, Koons brought in more assistants than

usual:

We were up to forty-seven at the end. There were a lot of peoplemixing color. And we had two different shifts, so the studio wasgoing twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, always withhalf the staff there working to complete the paintings.

Koons emphasized his complete control of the execution:

18

I mean, physically, I could execute these paintings, and theywould look identical to the paintings that are there now. But Iwouldn’t have been able to finish one painting in this time frame. So the thing is to be able to bring in a staff. And I’ve workedwith my main staff now for about five years, so they alreadyknow what I want. And they know my vocabulary and theyunderstand that there’s no room for interpretation.

Referring to the practices of Raphael and Rubens, Sylvester asked why, unlike those

masters, Koons chose not to do any of the paintings himself. Koons responded not only

by saying that his time was required for supervision, but also by reflecting that

participating in the work of painting would actually interfere with his growth as an artist:

When you have forty-seven people doing something, I have to bewatching all the process. Also, my vocabulary isn’t just theexecution of it; it’s also a continued conception of where I wantmy work to go in another area. So it has to do more with thereality of being able to be in a position where I can continue togrow as much as possible as an artist, instead of being tied downin the execution of the work.50

Damien Hirst is widely recognized as the leader of the young British artists, who

rose to prominence in the 1990s and in the process made London the center of the

contemporary art world. Commenting in 2000 on Hirst’s role in London’s art, an

American critic remarked that “He’s their prophet and deliverer, their Elvis and

Ayatollah,” while in 2005 a Financial Times columnist asked rhetorically, “Will Damien

Hirst, the one-time enfant terrible of ‘Brit art’, be seen in the same light as Picasso by

2050?”51 Unlike Koons, Hirst does not make preparatory drawings directly on a

computer, but has his drawings transferred to a computer by an assistant: “I’ll do a

drawing and then I’ll have it done by somebody who’s got a computer. It’s like a

fabrication drawing, basically, so it can be made from that drawing.”52 When asked why

he didn’t execute his own works, Hirst answered in conceptual terms:

19

You’ve got an idea, or you’ve got a vision, and you’ve got to seethat vision through. It’s like thinking, “I’m an artist; I’ve got topaint my own paintings.” And the logical extension of that is“Yeh, but who’s making my paints?”53

Although Hirst did not mention Marcel Duchamp, the last sentence appears to refer to a

comment made by Duchamp in 1961, in defending his readymades against the charge

that because they were manufactured they could not be works of art: “Since the tubes of

paint used by the artist are manufactured and ready made products we must conclude that

all the paintings in the world are ‘readymades aided’ and also works of assemblage.”54

Hirst also defended his practice of using assistants to make his famous spot

paintings, on the grounds that the assistants did better work than he did:

I only ever made five spot paintings. Personally. I can paintspots. But when I started painting the spots I knew exactly whereit was going, I knew exactly what was going to happen, and Icouldn’t be [bothered] doing it. And I employed people. And myspots I painted are [very bad]. They’re [very bad]. I did them onthe wrong background, there’s the pin-holes [from the compass]in the middle of the spots which at the time I said I wanted,because I wanted a kind of truth to it. Under close scrutiny, youcan see the process by which they were made. They’re [very bad]compared to…. The best person who ever painted spots for mewas Rachel [Howard]. She’s brilliant. Absolutely [very]brilliant. The best spot painting you can have by me is onepainted by Rachel.55

In discussing the exclusion of emotion by the grid structure of the spot paintings, Hirst made a

comment that clearly echoed Warhol: “I want them to look like they’ve been made by a person

trying to paint like a machine.”56

Conclusion

In 1958, Étienne Gilson stated what he considered a basic and immutable fact about

painting:

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In painting, it is impossible to distinguish between art itself andexecution, as if art were wholly in the mind and execution whollyin the hand. Art here is in execution, and if it is true to say that theintellect of the painter is engaged in all the motions of the hand, itis equally true to say that a painter could entertain no thoughtabout his art if his hand were not there to give to the word “art” aconcrete meaning.57

Within just two years, however, advanced artists had begun a series of innovations that

separated the conception and execution of paintings in precisely the way that Gilson had

declared impossible. Yves Klein’s use of living brushes allowed him to supervise the execution

of his anthropometries without dirtying himself with paint. Robert Rauschenberg could provide

instructions for recreating his White Paintings on another continent. Andy Warhol’s use of

silkscreens removed the human touch from painting altogether. On a number of occasions

Warhol declared he played no part in the execution of his works. Sol LeWitt’s philosophy of

conceptual art separated execution from innovation in principle, and his practice put this into

effect. And many of the most important artists active today, including Jeff Koons and Damian

Hirst, rarely if ever touch the paintings that are produced by dozens of hired assistants and are

sold as works by these masters.

Gilson made two basic mistakes. One was to state rules of art, and to declare that these

were immutable. In doing this he failed to recognize the force of the conceptual impulse in

twentieth-century art. The story of art in the past century is in large part one of young

iconoclastic innovators systematically breaking every significant rule, tradition, or convention

that they could identify. Thus Klein was 32 when he first used living brushes, Rauschenberg

was 37 when he authorized Hulten to recreate the White Paintings, Warhol was 34 when he

began to silkscreen his paintings, and LeWitt was 39 when he declared the freedom of the artist

from the need to execute his own paintings. Earlier in the twentieth century, conceptual artists

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had broken with the traditional association of painters with trademark styles by beginning to

change their styles at will, and had created new genres of art that intentionally broke the rules of

the time-honored forms of painting and sculpture.58 Gilson might have anticipated that

conceptual artists would find a way to break the rules of painting he stated in 1958. When

Klein, Warhol, and others promptly did this, they were demonstrating that artists, not scholars

or critics, determine the nature of art.

Yet Gilson did not err only in failing to foresee the conceptual innovations of the 1960s,

for his account of the history of painting missed a basic distinction in artistic practice that had

existed since the Renaissance. Gilson declared that “it cannot be doubted that the art of the

painter resides in his hands, in his fingers, and probably still more in his wrists, at the same time

that it resides in his intellect.”59 Yet Vasari knew that the relative importance of the hand and

the intellect varied enormously in the art of even the greatest painters.60 A number of art

historians have documented, and puzzled over, the fact that some Old Masters were better able

than others to delegate the work of painting to assistants, thus allowing these masters, including

Raphael and Rubens, to produce many more square feet of finished paintings than such others

as Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Rembrandt. The basic difference appears to lie in the ability of

conceptual innovators, from Raphael on, to produce a high degree of separation between

invention and execution, whereas for Leonardo and his fellow experimental innovators

invention and execution were inseparable. Gilson is thus just one of many art scholars who

have failed to perceive the distinction between conceptual and experimental innovators, and

consequently have failed to understand its implications. For the studio practices of such

conceptual artists as Klein, Rauschenberg, Warhol, LeWitt, Koons, and Hirst can be seen as

logical extensions of the earlier practices of their conceptual predecessors Raphael and Rubens.

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This process has produced some unexpected results. So for example the touch of the artist’s

hand, once regarded as the tangible demonstration of genius, is now seen by one of today’s

leading artists as an unnecessary and time-consuming feature of painting that actually interferes

with his growth as an artist.

In 1958, Etienne Gilson claimed that “The art of the painter is an art of the whole

man.”61 This is no longer true. Contrary to more than five centuries of tradition, during the

second half of the twentieth century many painters ceased to be manual laborers who dirty their

own hands with paint, and have instead become manufacturers, who hire employees to make

paintings according to their plans. As Damien Hirst recently put it, “The painter has stopped

being this hairy guy with paint all over him. He became a guy in a suit.”62 Making the touch of

the artist irrelevant to the authenticity of the painting is one significant element in the

conceptual revolution that made the art of the twentieth century so different from the art of all

earlier centuries.

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1. The two editions differ slightly in content, so the quotations in the followingdiscussion are drawn from both versions.

2. Étienne Gilson, Peinture et Réalité (Paris: Librairie Philosophique, 1958), p. 43.The translation is mine.

3. Étienne Gilson, Painting and Reality (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1958),pp. 29-30.

4. Gilson, Painting and Reality, p. 38.

5. Gilson, Painting and Reality, p. 85.

6. Gilson, Peinture et Réalité, p. 78.

7. Gilson, Painting and Reality, p. 86.

8. Gilson, Painting and Reality, pp. ix-x.

9. E.g. Toshiharu Nakamura, ed., Rubens and his Workshop (Tokyo: NationalMuseum of Western Art, 1994); Christopher Brown, Jan Kelch, and Pieter vanThiel, eds., Rembrandt: The Master and His Workshop (New Haven: YaleUniversity Press, 1991).

10. Zirka Filipczak, Picturing Art in Antwerp, 1550-1700 (Princeton: PrincetonUniversity Press, 1987), p. 82; also see Nakamura, Rubens and his Workshop, pp.97-118.

11. Nakamura, Rubens and his Workshop, p. 119.

12. Svetlana Alpers, Rembrandt’s Enterprise (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,1988), p. 102.

13. Alpers, Rembrandt’s Enterprise, p. 101.

14. Brown, Kelch, and van Thiel, Rembrandt, p. 83.

15. Alpers, Rembrandt’s Enterprise, p. 101.

16. Brown, Kelch, and van Thiel, Rembrandt, p. 21.

17. Alpers, Rembrandt’s Enterprise, pp. 59-60.Also see David Bomford, et. al., Art inthe Making: Rembrandt (London: National Gallery, 2006), p. 34.

Footnotes

I thank Robert Jensen for discussions of the issues treated in this paper.

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18. Brown, Kelch, and van Thiel, Rembrandt, p.83; Alpers, Rembrandt’s Enterprise,p. 60.

19. Alpers, Rembrandt’s Enterprise, p. 59.

20. Alpers, Rembrandt’s Enterprise, p. 59.

21. On Raphael, Leonardo, and Michelangelo, see Robert Jensen, “AnticipatingArtistic Behavior,” Historical Methods, Vol. 37, No. 3 (Summer 2004), pp. 137-53, and David Galenson, Old Masters and Young Geniuses (Princeton: PrincetonUniversity Press, 2006), Chap. 5.

22. Ernst van de Wetering, Rembrandt: The Painter at Work (Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press, 2000), pp. 6, 82.

23. Van de Wetering, Rembrandt, pp. 82-84.

24. Filipczak, Picturing Art in Antwerp, p. 82.

25. Richard Huelsenbeck, ed., The Dada Almanac (London: Atlas Press, 1993), p. 95.

26. Krisztina Passuth, Moholy-Nagy (London: Thames and Hudson, 1985), pp. 31-32.

27. Passuth, Moholy-Nagy, pp. 33, 394.

28. Sam Hunter, John Jacobus, and Daniel Wheeler, Modern Art, third ed. (NewYork: Vendome Press, 2004), pp. 245-46.

29. Françoise Gilot and Carlton Lake, Life with Picasso (New York: Doubleday,1964), pp. 220-21.

30. Sidra Stich, Yves Klein (Stuttgart: Cantz Verlag, 1994), pp. 173-77.

31. David Galenson, Artistic Capital (London: Routledge, 2006), pp. 68-72.

32. Calvin Tomkins, Off the Wall (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981), p. 71; KyleGann, American Music in the Twentieth Century (New York: Schirmer Books,1997), pp. 127, 139.

33. Tomkins, Off the Wall, p. 269.

34. Tomkins, Off the Wall, p. 269.

35. Gary Garrels, ed., The Work of Andy Warhol (Seattle: Bay Press, 1989), p. 86.

36. Victor Bockris, Warhol (New York: Da Capo Press, 1997), pp. 150-55.

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37. Kenneth Goldsmith, ed., I’ll Be Your Mirror (New York: Carroll and Graf, 2004),pp. 17-18.

38. Goldsmith, I’ll Be Your Mirror, p. 48.

39. Goldsmith, I’ll Be Your Mirror, pp. 119, 99, 297.

40. Bockris, Warhol, p. 164.

41. Bockris, Warhol, p. 170.

42. Goldsmith, I’ll Be Your Mirror, pp. 297-98.

43. Goldsmith, I’ll Be Your Mirror, p. 192.

44. Adachiara Zevi, Sol LeWitt Critical Texts (Rome: Editrice Inonia, 1994), p. 78.

45. Zevi, Sol LeWitt Critical Texts, p. 90.

46. Zevi, Sol LeWitt Critical Texts, p. 95.

47. Gary Garrels, ed. Sol LeWitt: A Retrospective (New Haven: Yale UniversityPress, 2000), pp. 38, 90.

48. Garrels, Sol LeWitt, p. 90.

49. Peter Schjeldahl, The “7 Days” Art Columns (Great Barrington, MA: TheFigures, 1990), p. 81; Arthur Danto, Unnatural Wonders (New York: Farrar,Straus, Giroux, 2005), p. 286.

50. David Sylvester, Interviews with American Artists (New Haven: Yale UniversityPress, 2001), pp. 347-51.

51. Jerry Saltz, Seeing out Loud (Great Barrington, MA: The Figures, 2003), p. 220;Deborah Brewster, “Why young, new money could fuel a bubble in hot, hip art,”Financial Times (November 12/13, 2005), p. 7.

52. Damien Hirst and Gordon Burn, On the Way to Work (New York: UniversePublishing, 2002), p. 19.

53. Hirst and Burn, On the Way to Work, p. 85.

54. Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson, eds., The Writings of Marcel Duchamp(New York: Da Capo Press, 1989), p. 142.

55. Hirst and Burn, On the Way to Work, p. 90.

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56. Virginia Button, The Turner Prize (London: Tate Publishing, 2003), p. 116.

57. Gilson, Painting and Reality, p. 34.

58. E.g. see David Galenson, “And Now for Something Completely Different: TheVersatility of Conceptual Innovators,” Historical Methods (forthcoming);Galenson, “A Conceptual World: Why the Art of the Twentieth Century is SoDifferent from the Art of all Earlier Centuries,” NBER Working Paper 12499(2006).

59. Gilson, Painting and Reality, p. 31.

60. Galenson, Old Masters and Young Geniuses, p. 103.

61. Gilson, Painting and Reality, p. 31.

62. Ann Temkin, Contemporary Voices (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2005),p. 58.